"This America's Life" in The New Guard VIII, finalist for the Knightville Poetry Prize 2018
This America’s Life
America grew up white in the suburbs, a cul-de-sac
playground where she took her training wheels off
& disappeared down the sidewalk. Returning when
mother’s chicken noodle casserole slid out the oven.
She woke up in the city after a night bothered by heat,
hollers, screech & rumble of garbage & delivery trucks.
She yawned, stretched her arms up town to her bank job.
Plumped her breasts for the handsome branch manager.
When her belly ballooned with her first, she quit &
moved with Sam to a colonial in the suburbs. America
would lie in bed, wait Sam’s departure. She’d listen
to Elvis on the radio, her hand curving around her unborn
child to wrestle her clit. Today, when she came, her body
rocked & muscled that baby out into America, 1958.
America walked her children to school then caught the train
into the city. Smoke stiffened the air, her eyes teared up
like her daughter’s from the bubble bath & America knew
to blend her body into this movement even as it screamed
& hurled across country. When she heard gunfire’s crack,
America raised a hand to guard her little ones, packed
them in the station wagon & drove to Memphis. Joined
the parade of mourners stretching down the Mississippi.
Southern hospitality hung from weeping willows,
reminding her to roll up her windows, keep out
the skeeters. At a diner somewhere in Louisiana, she
borrowed a dime, called Sam to say “don’t expect dinner,
don’t expect much, except to vote one lie after another.”
She cranked Janice Joplin, drove across America, 1968.
America went back to work once her kids left the house,
wearing a silk bow-tie blouse & no wedding ring.
Girls all around her walked on high ideals & heels
& spread their legs from one coast to the other—
but worked for real money. America woke up
to an alarm that yawned across the middle class
as factories cleaned up their act, you could sense
it in the air & the water—how it flowed upstream.
Cash floating past rural towns, cities, ebbing
into DC before washing down Wall Street.
America’s daughter took the pill, took lovers,
squeezed into short skirts & discos to dance
“black” & snort white—because that’s what
the cool white girls did in America, 1978.
America jazzercised like Jane Fonda in her teal
leotard & hot pink leg warmers to Frank singing
NYNY & Madonna’s Like a Virgin. She grew strong
& the men all around her grew weak. It was Good
Morning in America when she kissed her cubemate
goodbye for good one morning & sons stopped
rising all over the country. On TV, she watched
astronauts disappear into a hole in the ozone.
A flash, then ashes washed up with Castro’s refugees
on the Florida beach where her daughter married
a Cuban man & Sam refused to give the bride away
to a “spic just off the boat.” Sam grown lardo
on tax cuts big as a Texas steak. America lived
on Prozac to survive her 9-5 in America, 1988.
America moved to California like everyone—
lifted her face, breasts & struck a deal with age
to find work, a lover. She found a city in flames,
hot white tempers, scorched black streets cleaved
by a fault line that ran like OJ up the 405. Helicopters
buzzed her neighborhood & the brain of her son who
returned from the Gulf War for telling what no one
could ask. When he told his Dad, Sam rustled up
a new wife, kids, installed them in a mansion, big
like the houses America cleaned for Hollywood stars
who wanted a maid who spoke English & too old
to tempt husbands with tentacled hands. Evenings,
she searched the Internet for love, a cyber
constellation of beating hearts in America, 1998.
America kissed the new millennium a big hello
as she straddled her dotcom lover. His dick—
a joystick for forgetting grey hair or the blue
hairs of Florida standing by a stolen election.
Watching the towers fall & fall & fall on CNN,
she slipped back in time to when bombs fell
on Pearl Harbor & she’d heard FDR proclaim
war on the radio. His voice commanding
like God’s. Not this reed thin tenor urging
eye for eye. When Katrina cast her eye
on New Orleans, America wept a flood
of tears & kept crying as a bank too big to fail
foreclosed her house, life savings—until she fell
in love with a black man in America, 2008.
America’s son did too—& he married him
at City Hall 60 years after her wedding to Sam.
She witnessed it with her daughter, son-in-law
& grandchildren who glanced up from their iPhones
in time to Instagram the grooms’ kiss. Sam missed it.
He’d gotten rich in the bailout & angry at rag-head
terrorists he imagined were torching his country like
wildfires. While America protested yet another police
killing of an unarmed black boy, Sam walled off
his González grandchildren picked up his gun
& voted America Great Again. America has grown
tired and older now. But #shetoo marched pussy-hatted,
holding granddaughter Emma’s hand, together
dreaming of an alternative reality for America, 2018.
